To reduce Russia's ability to fund its war in Ukraine, Western governments imposed a price ceiling on Russian seaborne oil exports. Policy-makers sought a ceiling level to lower Russia's oil profits without raising excessively the world price buyers pay for oil. Previous analyses have explored...

This paper offers a historically grounded reinterpretation of Keynesianism within the context of U.S. economic development and global capitalist transformation. It traces the evolution of Keynes's core insights into a form of structural Keynesianism, shaped by institutionalism, post-Keynesian...

By extending the framework presented by Dosi et al. (2023b), we build an evolutionary agent-based model of the pharmaceutical sector featuring a government and a Public Research Lab investing in R&D and innovating across different therapeutic areas. After having empirically validated our...

This study investigates the impact of market structure on the performance of banks in Pakistan. It explicitly tests two competing hypotheses: the Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm and the Efficient Structure Hypothesis, providing insights into whether profitability stems from market...

Business dynamism has been slowing globally over the last several decades. In a recent study, Akcigit and Ates (2023) examine the relative importance of different channels behind this development and highlight weakened knowledge diffusion from the technology frontier to followers as a dominant...

This paper examines the relationship between labor market power and employer discrimination, providing new causal evidence on when and where discriminatory outcomes arise. We leverage mass layoffs and firm closures as a source of exogenous job search and combine this with an exact matching...

The electricity industry is undergoing a transformative evolution driven by three overarching trends: decentralization, digitalization, and decarbonization (3Ds). To ensure access to clean, affordable, and reliable energy for all by 2030 - UN sustainable development goal 7 (SDG7) - countries...

Firms can increase the demand for their products and consolidate their market power not only by increasing user utility but also by decreasing non-user utility. In this paper, we examine this mechanism by considering the case of smartphones. In particular, Apple has faced criticism for allegedly...

Purpose The paper examines the impact of market power on wages within the context of a developing country, focusing on Brazil. Design/methodology/approach With access to matched employer-employee data from Brazil, we first characterized the evolution of the local labor market concentration...

Using register data, we document that the average German labor market, defined by hires in combinations of 3-digit occupations, requirement levels, and commuting zones, is highly concentrated (HHI=0.257). By EU antitrust thresholds, 56 percent of these labor markets feature moderate or high...

Research about trade liberalization's impact on markups has focused on manufacturing due to data availability considerations. How do these effects vary across sectors? Which industries become more and less competitive as trade barriers are eliminated? We leverage firm-level tax records from the...

This paper documents changes in investors' demand for sovereign debt during a debt crisis. Using a dataset containing individual bids on Portuguese debt auctions, I document that bid functions become more inelastic during the crisis. That is, investors require bigger drops in price to buy...

The Middle East (ME) is often perceived as region with rentier economies and uncompetitive markets. Evidence of market power in the region however is scant. In this paper, we ask the following three questions: Is the ME uniquely uncompetitive? Has the evolution of market power in the region...

We study changes in job reallocation in Europe after 2000 using novel microaggregated data that we collected for 19 European countries. In all countries, we document broad-based declines in job reallocation rates that concern most economic sectors and size classes. These declines are mainly...

This paper examines the effect of green investments on market power. I measure the market power as markup following the method provided in De Loecker and Warzynski (2012). For green investments, I consider specifically the investments of firms in energy efficient technologies, both as the binary...

The functioning of the banking sector is key for economic growth. In this paper, we first gather banks' balance sheet monthly regulatory information in a consistent manner for seven Latin American countries. Second, we estimate lending markups and deposits markdowns in each country over time....

This paper examines the relationship between wages and market power at the firm level. We derive firm-specific measures of labor market power and present a natural decomposition of wage changes into shifts in labor market power and labor productivity. Our findings indicate that 50-60 percent of...

This study estimates and decomposes recruitment elasticity, a key measure of employer market power, across job-matching stages using data from Japan's largest job-matching intermediary. On average, recruitment elasticity is negative but not statistically significantly different from zero....

I study the passthrough of regulated ad valorem pharmacy markups and reduced Value Added Tax (VAT) rates to pharmaceutical retail prices in Finland. My reduced form evidence shows that pharmaceutical manufacturers respond to a decrease in regulated pharmacy markups by increasing their wholesale...

We study the determination of market power at the firm and industry levels when heterogeneous firms compete for sales to ex ante homogeneous buyers in a market with both directed and random search and free entry of firms that differ in productivity. Search and the distribution of productivity...

This paper examines the importance of labor market power and firm productivity for understanding the immigrant-native pay gap. Using matched employer-employee data from Canada, I estimate a wage-posting model that incorporates two-sided heterogeneity and strategic interactions in wage setting....

According to the economics Nobel laureate, Kenneth Arrow, "… capitalism is a flawed system. It probably has the same virtues as Churchill attributed to democracy: It’s the worst system except for any other." Thus, capitalism is a necessary evil, but it is not inherently bad. I argue that...